Primary Threat

by Jack Mars

  It was a little bit astonishing to him that he had traveled to the Arctic Circle, engaged in an underwater operation and a gun battle, nearly got killed, then came all the way back here, and Becca still didn’t know a thing about it. It was possible the whole thing might be filed under Late Night at the Office and forgotten.

  He welcomed that, but it also worried him. He couldn’t keep lying to her like this. It wasn’t fair to her, and it wasn’t fair to him. His career couldn’t be based on lies. She had to be an equal partner. She had to know what he was doing, and why.

  As a practical matter, she was bound to find out sooner or later. She attended SRT functions. People talked. He could see it unfolding, months from now, people standing around, shoveling catered food into their mouths:

  “Stone, remember that FUBAR Arctic Circle op?”

  “Oh, which one was that?” Becca might say.

  “You should have seen it. Scuba swim under the ice, in a storm. Everybody nearly got murdered coming out of the water. A bunch of civilians got massacred. A guy tried to blow himself up, but Murphy shot him in the head at the last second.”

  Becca turning to Luke: “I’ve never heard of this. Were you there, honey?”

  “Ha, ha, he was there, all right.”

  Right now, Luke’s skin was red from exposure to the cold. He looked a little like a lobster that had been boiled in its tank. His face was red. His hands were red. His fingers were even still a little numb. The feeling, and the coloration, were both starting to fade, but they were going to be around a while longer, and they were going to be hard to explain. It was early September. The weather was still warm. Maybe he had gotten too much sun on his motorboat.

  Trudy sat in front of a laptop, the one that Luke had taken from the oil rig. She looked tired too, like she might fall asleep in her chair. The laptop was a Toughbook style, made of heavy metal and surrounded by shockproof rubber.

  “We’ve confirmed that the language used on the laptop is Serbian,” Trudy said.

  “Serbian?” Luke said. “Not Russian?”

  Trudy gestured to the young guy. The guy smiled. “Hi Agent Stone, I’m Saul Leishman. I’m a language analyst. My specialty is Eastern Europe. I’m fluent in Russian, Serbian, Hungarian, and I have a bit of Greek, Romanian, and Czech as well.”

  Luke nodded to the man, who looked like he had graduated high school about eight minutes ago. Something about his perky demeanor aggravated Luke.

  “Do you even have security clearance to look inside that computer?”

  “Stone,” Don said. “You’re overtired.”

  “No, it’s okay,” Leishman said. “I’m a freelancer, but I hold security clearances with the Bureau proper, as well as the NSA and the CIA. I’ve also worked with Treasury and the State Department. I’ve actually done a lot of government work, and I’m pretty good, if I do say so myself.”

  The thought flashed through Luke’s mind: if Don had brought in a language expert who worked for the other intelligence agencies, that meant by now everybody knew Luke had taken the laptop.

  “I’m not worried that you can’t translate the material,” Luke said. “I’m worried who you’re going to talk to about it. We went in there last night, and we nearly walked into a buzz saw.”

  For the first time, it hit Luke what was so wrong about the mission—the terrorists had deployed an underwater camera and were waiting for the SEALs to come up out of the sea, as if someone had told them exactly where and when the attack would be. They had mounted giant spotlights along the waterfront.

  “Stone, if you don’t stand down, I’m going to send you home.”

  Luke looked at Don. Don’s eyes were ice. He meant it.

  “Okay,” Luke said. “Okay, I’m sorry. I’d like it noted that I don’t feel good about this, but please...” He looked at Leishman. “Continue.”

  Leishman shook his head. “You don’t have to worry about me, Agent Stone.”

  “Drop it,” Don said. “Let’s get to the meat of this thing.”

  Leishman nodded. “All right. Pretty much everything in the laptop is Serbian, including the encryption used to protect it. It was an encryption that the NSA broke back in 1999 during the Kosovo War, which apparently was never updated. Agent Swann already had the decryption key in a database, and he unlocked the computer in minutes.”

  Swann was slumped in a chair. His eyes were closed. His glasses were on the table. He raised a hand, apparently just to prove he was listening. He didn’t say anything.

  “That’s why we could access the contents so quickly. And once we got in, it was clear immediately who we were dealing with.”

  Leishman looked at Trudy. “Agent Wellington and I…”

  Luke shook his head. The kid was enamored with Trudy. Of course he was. When did he meet her, half an hour ago?

  Trudy nodded. “At this point, the group that seized the Martin Frobisher appears to be the remnants of a paramilitary unit called the White Hawks, which began as a gang of violent Serbian nationalist soccer hooligans in Belgrade during the early 1990s. They were volunteers organized by a mafia don named Zoran Sokic, also known as Sakal, which translates into English as the Jackal. The White Hawks were active during the Yugoslavian Civil Wars and the Kosovo War, and seemed to get most of their funding, and pay their soldiers, through looting and pillaging. They were involved in at least three massacres of Bosnian and Croat civilians, as well as mass rapes and other war crimes. They were believed to have been wiped out, and Sokic himself committed suicide in his cell at the Hague while awaiting trial for war crimes.”

  “And yet here they are,” Luke said, looking at Don. Don’s reading glasses were perched at the end of his nose. He busied himself reading some scribblings on a yellow legal pad. It was clear to Luke that he had heard most of this already.

  “Still committing massacres.”

  Leishman raised a hand. “It’s possible that most of these guys were merely inspired by the White Hawks, and have resurrected the name. We haven’t come across evidence yet that any of the men who attacked the oil rig were original members.”

  “Then who were they, and what did they want?”

  “We don’t know. None of them have been identified yet.”

  “So I guess you don’t really have any evidence that they weren’t original members either.”

  “The attack was well planned and coordinated,” Trudy said. “Clearly some of the perpetrators have formal military experience, and possibly combat experience.”

  Luke thought back to the fight. Those guys were machine-gunning swimmers in the water. And they murdered a group of defenseless civilians. Newbies usually had a hard time with things like that. The last man standing had gray hair, and he didn’t seem afraid to die in the least. If that didn’t sound like people who had fought in the Yugoslav Civil Wars, then he didn’t know what did.

  “Whoever they were, we’ll know that soon,” Trudy said. “My understanding is photographs, fingerprints, and DNA from the terrorists have already been sent to Interpol. In the meantime, my guess is they wanted revenge for the NATO bombing campaign over Serbia in the spring of 1999.

  “As you may recall, that bombing campaign ended the Kosovo War, and destroyed Serbia’s military. It also laid waste to Serbia’s infrastructure—including their road system, bridges, railways, electrical system, communications, and just about every other aspect of modernity they had. They were humiliated and rendered basically helpless. It was a disaster for them on an epic scale, though most of the world saw it as nothing less than they deserved for the atrocities they committed during those wars.

  “In the aftermath, they became completely reliant on the NATO occupation, their sworn enemies, to feed, clothe, heat, house, and provide them with water supplies. Now, the bombing happened six and a half years ago. But there are lingering questions about how NATO and United Nations personnel conducted themselves among the civilian population. Women and children forced into prostitution, trading schemes involving food
and heating oil for sex, and things of that nature. There’s a lot of anger about that in Serbia, especially among the younger generations.”

  “Okay,” Luke said, beginning to see it now. “So it’s a terrorist attack as payback for bombing and occupying them. But it’s carried out by a paramilitary group not attached to the government or Serbian military. That way the Serbs can say the terrorists were acting independently, and no one knew anything about it. And there’s no one for us to retaliate against.”

  “Sure,” Trudy says. “Sounds reasonable.”

  “But why attack an oil rig in the middle of the Arctic? Why not set off a bomb at a festival, or attack a subway train in New York?”

  Don looked up now. “There was some other reason,” he said. “The attack wasn’t just an attack.”

  “We think they plan to use it for propaganda purposes,” Trudy said.

  “They massacred dozens of unarmed men,” Luke said. “Not exactly good public relations.”

  “That depends on your audience. It shows certain people that America is weak. We’re a nation of soft targets, and we’re leaving important installations completely undefended. It might inspire others to look for similar soft targets.”

  Luke shook his head. “But so far, no one even knows any of this happened.”

  Trudy looked at Swann.

  “Swann?”

  Swann opened his eyes. He sighed.

  “Luke, it’s an old computer, but it had been upgraded with improved memory and processing speed—that stuff is dirt cheap nowadays. There was an encrypted high-speed satellite uplink, which was functioning right up until the moment you closed it and put it to sleep. Very good, very new tech. They were feeding live video from around the facility to the computer, which was compiling it and sending it to a satellite. We’re talking video from the battlefield, from the command center, even from the room where the massacre happened. It all got sent to a black satellite, very hard to crack, and from there it’s anybody’s guess where it went and what path it took.”

  “Is anyone trying to crack that satellite now?” Luke said.

  Swann shrugged. “Can’t. It went dark. Someone pulled the plug, and it’s basically a space rock now. But unless it was a corporate satellite owned by one of the big internet companies, which I highly doubt, then I’m gonna go with Russia or China.”

  “And with Russia and Serbia’s long entwined history of close alliances and cultural affinities…” Trudy said.

  Swann nodded. “Yeah. Probably Russians.”

  “So you think the Russians set this up,” Luke said. “But I fail to see how it makes them look good.”

  “They have their methods,” Don said. “I guess we’re just going to have to wait and find out what they are.”

  * * *

  It didn’t take long to find out.

  Luke was in his office, at his desk. There was a cup of coffee in front of him. He had stopped tasting the coffee a while ago. It was having no effect. He glanced at the digital clock on the wall. 11:29 a.m.

  All he really needed to do was pack up his things, stumble out to the car, and drive about ten or twelve minutes to the house. Traffic might make it fifteen minutes. Somehow, it didn’t seem possible. He lived close to the office now, but at this moment, his home seemed far out of reach.

  The phone on his desk rang. He glanced at the caller ID.

  Becca.

  He picked it up. He tried to put on a tone that suggested he was tired, but not nearly as exhausted as he actually felt.

  “Hey, babe,” he said, his voice almost a singsong. “I’m just finishing up here and…”

  Her voice had a tone altogether different from his. He couldn’t put his finger on what it was.

  “Luke?”

  “Yeah. Hi, sweetheart.”

  “Luke, where were you last night?”

  “Where was I?”

  Her voice was cold, as cold as the Arctic Ocean itself.

  “Yes.”

  Suddenly he was treading on dangerous ground. Thin ice, as it were. She seemed to know something, something important, and if he lied about this…

  He hated it. He hated this whole stupid game. He was continually covering up where he’d been and what he did. No, not because he was having affairs, or drinking too much, or gambling, or anything along those lines. It was because he was out there on the edge, serving his country. He was doing the things he believed in. And, he hoped, making his wife, and one day his son, proud of him.

  “You know where I was,” he said, copping out completely.

  “No, I don’t,” she said. “I want you to tell me.”

  “I was at work.”

  That was true, as far as it went. It didn’t exactly tell the whole story, but…

  “Where were you at work?”

  “Becca, what’s going on?”

  “Tell me where you were.”

  He hit upon a new tack to take. As he said the words, they seemed right. They felt good coming out of his mouth. They were in a sweet spot, somewhere between a lie and the truth. They were an obfuscation.

  “Sweetheart, I can’t tell you everything. My work is often classified, you know that. I’m not really at liberty…”

  “Oh my God, it’s true,” she said, her voice suddenly shaking. “The whole thing is true, isn’t it? Everything, all of it.”

  “What’s true?” he said.

  “I can’t… I can’t talk to you right now. I just… There’s no words.”

  The line went dead.

  Instantly, a shadow seemed to loom behind Luke.

  He turned, and Swann was standing there. Swann was tall and gangly, and he looked like some strange bird. This might have been the first time Luke had seen him in this way. Exhaustion would do that to you. It gave you insights your alert brain would never even consider. Swann could be a great blue heron, or some kind of sand hill crane. Luke barely even noticed what crazy clothes the man was wearing.

  Swann also looked sick, maybe from exhaustion, maybe from something else.

  “Have you seen the TV?” he said.

  Luke shook his head. “No. Something bad?”

  “You should come watch it,” Swann said.

  * * *

  A group of people had gathered in the lobby, where a large flat-screen TV was mounted high on the wall near the waiting area.

  CNN was on.

  A headline ran along the bottom: Bloodbath off Alaska Coast.

  A pretty thirty-something news anchor sat at a desk. She had dark hair and wore a blue suit. Behind her, hazy darkened scenes of combat were playing out. She held some papers in her hand, stared down at them for a moment, then looked into the camera and read from a teleprompter.

  “What you are about to see is graphic, but has been edited for American television. It has already appeared in many parts of the world on the Al Jazeera network, Russia Now, SinoVision, and other outlets. Although edited, it is not for the faint of heart, and viewer discretion is advised.”

  She looked down at her papers again, then back up. Why did she look at those papers? What was in them? To Luke, she really just seemed to read her lines off a video screen. Was it all an act?

  Watching the TV news was a strange assignment for Luke. Everybody at the SRT seemed to watch the news all the time. Keeping up with the news required that you watch television, not Luke’s favorite pastime.

  The newscaster went on:

  “What the video purports to show is an American oil rig in the Arctic Circle, off the coast of Alaska. The Serbian radical environmentalist group Earth Defenders claims that it seized the oil rig, and temporarily took the oil workers prisoner, to demonstrate American hypocrisy. According to a press release from Earth Defenders issued through a designated spokesman, the rig, although out at sea, was actually drilling inside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR. By law, the ANWR is a nature preserve, off limits to drilling for oil or natural gas.”

  She stared at the screen. Her voice shook now.
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  “Earth Defenders claims that the rig was attacked by American commandos last night. They further claim that the commandos killed all of the Earth Defenders activists, and in a false flag operation, executed the oil workers. The claims are beyond words, as is the footage that has been released. We caution you that none of these claims have been verified by authorities.”

  “Then why repeat them?” someone in the lobby crowd said.

  “And again, the footage we’re about to show is graphic. Viewer discretion is advised.”

  The footage started rolling. Men in heavy clothes, on a frozen beach, were being mowed down by machine gun fire. There was a glare from overhead lights. The pouring rain and the foam spray from the waves crashing made it difficult to make anything out. It was hard to say what the men were doing. It was impossible to say what, if anything, the men held in their hands. They could well be unarmed.

  Now other men in scuba gear were storming out of the water. It was dark. The men were dropping their gear, cutting themselves out of their dry suits. As Luke watched, a couple of the first divers took guns out and executed wounded men on the beach. They went systematically from one to another, firing a single shot to the head.

  The shots echoed hollowly. CRACK! CRACK!

  “Oh man,” someone said.

  It was a very bad look. Luke hadn’t seen it happen, but he understood it. There were dead SEALs in the water. And soldiers were trained to kill enemies in combat, even wounded enemies. This was so the wounded enemies wouldn’t suddenly turn around and kill you. No one had surrendered. There was no time for surrender.

  But it made for terrible TV news.

  To someone in the audience, the men on the ground could easily seem helpless. That audience member had no way of knowing that just a moment before, those men were firing machine guns at equally helpless men swimming in the frozen sea.

  The scene changed. The camera panned across frightened men on the floor, somewhere indoors. It was dark. The men appeared to be civilians, and they had their hands tied behind their backs. Flashlights shone on them, and along the steel walls. Other men were standing. The standing men were wearing cold-weather fatigues. The fatigues were consistent with United States Army uniforms.